


Sometimes I Wake Up and Forget Who I Am

by MacaroniSwirls



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Humanstuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-30 09:48:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacaroniSwirls/pseuds/MacaroniSwirls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Old memories tinge their mind like oil upon the ocean - twelve children piece together the bits and pieces of past lives, and attempt to figure out what to do with it. Part 1: Aradia Megido</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes I Wake Up and Forget Who I Am

**Everyday Death Speaks to Me and I Don't Know What to Say**

Your name is ARADIA MEGIDO, and you aren’t sure what to think of the fact that anyone at all thought that that was a good name for a kid. You’ve done your research, and you’ve found your name’s origins. It’s some book about witches, the original witch who taught the poor her wicked ways, stirred up class warfare, worked to beat down the Catholic Church.

You trust your mother’s empty headedness enough to guess that she retrieved the name from some half-forgotten memory. Other than such impulsive displays as this, she was the image of a good mother. All the cheesy child-rearing books, all the domestic activities, all the required displays of affection – she had them all trapped and mastered, and could’ve gotten a job as an encyclopedia on how to Raise and Nurture. She got you to the proper private schools, took you to the proper preparatory courses, made sure you become a Proper and Successful Child who would become a Proper and Successful Adult.

The first time you try to run away, you’re seven. It’s so much easier than it was supposed to be. 

All you had to do was start walking. Mom thinks you’re going to a friend’s house. The neighbors think nothing – there are so many better things to attend to than the wanderings of a young child.

Two hours later, you are at a graveyard, and sat and absorbed it all: the hearty smell of dead bodies being reborn; the silent persistence of the grave markers; the funeral flowers marking the rest from official; the graceful tombs sheltering their occupants as per the function of a last hideaway.

You let the dead smells enter you, the dead feelings and the dead sights and the dead silence and the dead taste of the air. Lay there long enough, and maybe you’ll grow nearer – not become dead, maybe, but something akin to it. A guardian, of shorts, you decide. If you’ll run away anywhere, it’ll be here.

Three hours later the police find you, explain to your parents that they found you huddled up next to an aged, rotting tomb, and when you come back the next day, it is decided that you have A Problem.

You aren’t sure why it’s A Problem – your family had always felt a deep connection with spirits. It was only later that you realized it was because you were on the wrong side of the spiritual – where your parents and all the parents before them had the Holy Spirit, the ones you admired your just spirits – regular people who were long dead and gone. 

Enough nagging and disappointment eventually gets you to shift your focus to archaeology. Your family never quite realizes that it’s just another type of ghost – looking at the spirits of old buildings, the imprints left from the past.

You are twelve when you parents talk you to some ruins about an hour away from your home town of Carson City, Nevada. Old Indian Ruins, built out of mud and sweat and blood, just their stagnant remains are left. You bought your whip and hat for this excursion – juvenile, yes, but at the same time they made you feel oddly professional. 

The tour guide takes you around the attractions, and pictures are taken when allowed, and you listen intently to every talk of how they lived, and it’s only when you take a look at the ruins that things go wrong. Only when you see the stark stone set against the reddening sky, and it reminds you of something you had seen so long ago, though you’re not sure when, and the memory twists your stomach like a wet towel. You then throw up against a fine remnant of Native American culture. 

This event had started right after you had begun going to therapy but right after your father died. Grief counseling had been the first thing on your mother’s mind when your dad died in a chemical explosion, but you were okay.

“Oookay,” you tell you therapist after she asks you how you feel, the o elongonated until it’s almost a blank bit of space as opposed to an actual letter. “Death has never bothered me at all.”

It’s true, you never cried when the dog died at the end of Old Yeller. You once saw a squirrel get run over on the street. You saw Snape die, and you held the dead body of your first cat, and you saw your friends head burst open after an unfortunate incident with concrete. When your dad died, it just felt like the natural course of things; the end result. Dominos falling over in a uniform line and playing out the natural order of things. It makes you happy. 

You tell her this.

She asks how you feel about your own death.

“I find it a bit exciting, actually. Graveyards are really nice.”

After that meeting, therapy became a regular thing. Apparently it had been recommended to your mom after the session.

They spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint some specific problem, some long lost memory that made you feel that way, but it’s never found. After three meetings, you’re declared sane enough, and you manage to retrieve that hour each week to yourself. 

There’s only one moment that you ever really paid much heed to in that whole section of your life, and that was when you left there for the last time. A lone stranger on a bench, probably waiting for some appointment, but he is wiry and thin and has huge dorky glasses, and you’re not sure why, but you talk to him.

“Sup?” The question is innocent enough in its genericness, and he looks up at you.

“Do I know you?”

“Nope. Aradia Megido.”

“Sollux Captor.”

The name is familiar, an empty puzzle piece fitting into your mind. 

“Nice to meet you!”

There’s a pause, the long ones that feel like you’re on an empty horizon, looking out for miles. You wait, and he waits, and you’re the one to break the silence.

“Soooo…?”

“I’m not going to see you again after this, so what’s the point.” He’s honest, fatalistic, and what he says is true, and lonely, but also something you don’t agree with.

“Don’t be like that! Lives are like a tangled string, you know, they meet more than once.” You say, and he just looks at you.

It’s the last time he sees you, but it’s not the last time you see him. You find him once more in your beloved element, as he proceeds down to his final rest, an oaken bed carrying him to the other life, where he will be laid under the soothing grip of dirt and grime. His face was familiar even in death.

There are other people like him – people who you know, yet you don’t, but none ever really strike you the same way. You can list them off the top of your head: a wiry young boy dreaming to be a lawyer – you met him on a youth conference; a bedraggled and angry young man – you met him running away on the bus transit; a young girl with a cat hat – she is a just a fuddled memory, too long ago to properly remember.

You tell your mom about these people, and how you know them, and she just nods her head. She is used to you saying strange things. 

The most important day of note after that is a stereotypical day for many others – turning 18, graduating, earning the long awaited taste of freedom. You tell yourself that to you, it’s something so much more. 

It really isn’t, you are just one more child being released into the world of the aged, but that doesn’t make the freedom taste any less sweet. 

Your mom insists you go through college, and you do, for it is interesting enough.

Maybe that’s the moment that your master plan started to fall apart, not because of college, maybe, but because of what you were thrust into as you went there, the beats and throes of life. 

Cornell itself was a great college – history, traditions, prestige – all the great things often found in ancient institutions. Some of the older buildings spoke to you, through their cracks and their creases and their age. The weather was a bit drab and gloomy, but you’ve never had anything against a little rain and clouds. 

You meet him in an advanced history class, and he is all muscle and formality and familiarity. He’s the first of the ones whose familiarity makes you feel uncomfortable, like he did something horrible to you, something unforgivable, something invasive and awful and it makes you squirm just a bit thinking about it.

“Nice to meet you, Aradia, I’m Equius,” he smiles, and you force yourself to smile back. And as far as you can see, he leans towards the kind, and the cautious, and the gentle. He is hesitant in everything he does, and you wish to know why you felt betrayed by him before you even met him.

You aren’t sure why you keep on talking to him, even if it weren’t for the discomfort, he is much too rigid for your tastes. Let when you’re near him, you feel like your grasping at memories, a flood of the unfathomable just within reach, and it only needs a simple rock thrown against it, and you will drown in its death.

The stone came one day, and it was such a miniscule tap, but the tap was against a weak part of the way, and the proper tap in the proper place can bring even the largest of structures crashing down.

Equius is tap tap tapping against the skeleton of the robot, and you’re sitting there watching as he puts a shell on it, and puts a circuitboard in, and makes it only a few steps away from being a near living thing. It’s a quiet evening, and you probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t.

“Aradia, did you hear about the suicides earlier this week?” 

“Yeah, everyone has.”

A small pause. You can feel him scraping through his mind, stringing words together.

“ I was thinking,” He says, installing red eyes that stare and stare at you into his little creation. “Maybe we could, you know, go out for some coffee sometime.”

As far as pick up lines go, it’s cliché, but something is familiar. And you aren’t sure what combination of things make it happen; maybe it’s the confession of attraction, or the portrait of his dead grandmother (death always has a factor in these revelations, you know it), or the otherwise silence in his room, empty as void.

You think it’s the eyes, looking back on it now. Red robotic eyes that at some point were yours, red eyes that you would rather have not seen again. In the end, you think that was the final clue that made all the memories come flooding in. Things feeling so distant and yet so close, things implausible and yet real.

The next day you drop out of college, and a week later you find yourself in the same graveyard that you had run away from all those years ago. You smile. A job opening was conveniently there, and you find yourself watching the funeral processions, watching the strangers and the familiar (for instance, a young boy you met at a therapists office, years ago) passing by in their final rests.

You figure you’ll still be a great Handmaid; the best caretaker of death.


End file.
